This invention relates to wireless communication systems and, more particularly, to wireless communication systems that use techniques that compensate for interference among signals within the system.
Signals transmitted between base stations and mobile terminals within a wireless communication system interfere with one another to some extent, thereby negatively affecting the ability of the system to accurately receive and decode these signals. However, various techniques are known to compensate for such interference. For example, so-called dirty paper coding adjusts a signal, before it is transmitted, to take into account some of the interference the signal will encounter after it is transmitted. By contrast, so-called multi-user detection estimates the interference in a received signal and subtracts this estimated interference from the signal. Techniques such as the two just described allow signals to be transmitted within the system at, for example, increased data rates and/or at lower power levels, without increasing the error rates, thereby increasing the overall system throughput, i.e., the rate of communication traffic the system can handle at any given time. This throughput improvement allows the system, for example, to accommodate more users.